Eleanor was seven the first time she watched a woman hang for witchcraft. She was eleven the night her own magic answered her father’s hands — and a priest in crimson robes stepped from the crowd and claimed her before the mob could light the kindling.
He called it salvation.
He burned her village to the ground to make sure no one could call it anything else.
Now she is Wren — silent, watched, and quietly extraordinary — the secret instrument of a Royal Confessor whose ambitions reach far beyond the crown he serves. Only one person in the palace sees her clearly: Prince Kaelen, the second-born son with nothing of his own but a gift for noticing what no one else does.
What begins between them as stolen friendship deepens, dangerously, into something that could destroy them both. Because Father Thaddeus has spent seven years sharpening Wren for a single moment. And when that moment comes, in a cathedral draped in wedding silk, the only weapon that can stop him is the one he forged himself.
A lush, slow-burning tale of witches and princes, faith twisted into power, and the long, patient work of becoming unbreakable.
